Imagga Featured Hack: Hipster Bar

Hipster bar is where only hipsters are allowed! How do you reinforce that? With a physical doorman who’s job is to ruthlessly send back guys without beards, or, in the case of the Max Dovey’s project – using Imagga’s image recognition technology. The hipster bar was open to the public for the duration of WdW Festival 2015.

Let’s get into the details of this quite unique usage of Imagga’s powerful image recognition technology. To enter the bar, you need to stand in front of camera that snaps a photo of you and then sends it to Imagga servers. Then the tech analyses your look and as result returns how certain the system is you are a hipster.
If you are found over 90% hipster, the door of the bar will open and you can join great company of people that are hipster enough.

Hipster is quite loose term and usually is used to describe a subculture of people who attempt to keep up to date with the latest trend and remain ‘hip’. These are men and women in their 20’s and 30’s that value progressive politics and independent thinking, and often have appetite for art and indie-rock & counterculture. Of course being hipster includes certain look – thick rimmed glasses, tight-fitting jeans, old-school sneakers, side-swept bangs and beards (men only).

Max Dovey, an artist from Rotterdam, who initiated the project, sourced thousands of images of hipsters to be used by our team to build a special hipster deep learning mode. The specific classifier was able to easily distinguish between snaps of hipsters and all the rest. Here’s how it actually worked:

Have another crazy idea? Don’t hesitate to try it out – with our custom training only the sky is the limit… if you are hip enough 😉